A White Paper for the Astro2020 Decadal Survey Detecting the Birth of Supermassive Black Holes Formed from Heavy Seeds Thematic Area: Galaxy Evolution, Multi-Messenger Astronomy and Astrophysics, Formation and Evolution of Compact Objects, Cosmology and Fundamental Physics Principal Author: Name: Fabio Pacucci Institution: Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, Yale University Email:
[email protected] Phone: (203)298-2478 Co-authors: Vivienne Baldassare1, Nico Cappelluti2, Xiaohui Fan3, Andrea Ferrara4, Zoltan Haiman5, Priyamvada Natarajan1, Feryal Ozel3, Raffaella Schneider6, Grant R. Tremblay7, Megan C. Urry1, Rosa Valiante8, Alexey Vikhlinin7, Marta Volonteri9 1Yale University, 2University of Miami, 3University of Arizona, 4Scuola Normale Superiore, 5Columbia University, 6Sapienza Universita` di Roma, 7Center for Astrophysics j Harvard & Smithsonian, 8INAF - Roma, 9Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris Artistic representation of a heavy black hole seed, formed in the early Universe. Despite numerous theoretical and observational efforts to observe the birth of the first population of black holes, thus far we are still lacking a confirmed detection. The formation of these objects would be among the most spectacular events in the history of the Universe. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss) Introduction The dawn of the first black holes (and stars) occurred ∼ 100 Myr after the Big Bang (Barkana and Loeb 2001). It is very remarkable that numerous observations in the past two decades have shown 9−10 the presence of Super-Massive Black Holes (SMBHs, with masses 10 M ) less than 700 Myr later (e.g., Fan et al. 2006; Mortlock et al. 2011; Wu et al. 2015; Banados˜ et al. 2018). A “seed” is the original black hole that, growing via gas accretion and mergers, generates a SMBH.